Lehman
College Art Gallery is pleased to announce a survey exhibition of Polish-born,
New York based artist Monika Weiss. "Monika Weiss: Five Rivers"
presents an overview of the artist's works created between 1999-2005 with
a specific focus on new performative installations and most recent drawing
series. Complex in their subtle interplay of meaning and form, Weiss'
work is often site-specific, combining sculpture, live action, video projection
and sound environment. During the last six years the artist has produced
a large number of new works and has been widely shown in the United States
and Europe.

In
her multi-media installations, combined with performance, Monika Weiss
explores physical properties of the act of drawing, which she combines
with references to the ancient and medieval symbols and concepts of the
world and the human being. Weiss uses her own body directly in her art
as both the maker and the inhabitant of the artistic object. In one of
Weiss' installation series Ennoia the artist immerses herself for several
hours inside a water-filled chalice, while a projected image of the immersion
and the underwater sounds mirror her action. In her ongoing series Intervals
Weiss creates drawing landscapes that are spaces, which others may enter
and fill with their own actions. In her work all formal means are subordinated
to one major objective: awareness of presence and, conversely, of absenceÑin
many works the artist is no longer there, leaving us with video and sound
memory of her immersions and with the drawn mark. In her work the artist
often demarcates the given space with materials such as paper, drawing
tools, water, canvas, sculpted objects, projected video, sound environment
and her own body.

The
exhibition title, "Five Rivers," refers to the mythological
waters of the underworld through which one must pass in order to redeem
their life. It is a metaphor that has for centuries served as cultural
signifiers for poets, artists and composers, connoting the passage between
here and there, the boundary between being and non-being. Looking through
that metaphor at the artist's last several years of production, one notices
the importance of fluidity, repetition and motion both as symbolic allusions
and as physical phenomena. In Weiss' work this most elemental concern-being
here and now, the being of the body-coincides and collapses into culture,
history and language. In Weiss' work language functions as drawing, speech,
text, singing, composed music, and natural sounds. In her recent installation
"Phlegethon-Milczenie" (2005), books printed before the Second
World War serve as objects on which the artist crawls and draws, outlining
the world around her body with her eyes purposefully closed. Like Mona
Hatoum's sculptures and Ann Hamilton's installations, in Weiss' work language
always exists in the context of body.

The
work also addresses the concept of landscape and ground and the ontological
tension between the body and the surfaces of skin and earth alike. In
Weiss' videos she captures her own action from an aerial viewpoint. As
in Ana Mendieta's "Siloueta" series, one finds an almost obsessive
return of the generic female silhouette in Weiss' drawings, performances
and videos. Weiss' projects bring the issue of her body, and by extension,
of our body, towards the ambiguous territory of the semantics of abstraction,
through the poetic play of trace, absence, repetition and cultural signification.

"In
her work, the tremulous private body - her body and, by implication, my
body - is best understood as a space 'in between,' a permeable membrane
held taut between two polarities in the personae of two Muses, Mnemosyne
and Lethe... Weiss' signature understanding of temporality bears a striking
resemblance to that of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty: a
sense of time as an institution, a system of equivalences with infinite
interstices." (James C. Campbell catalogue essay "Drawing on
Syncope: The Performativity of Rapture in the Art of Monika Weiss")

Originally
trained as a classical musician, early in her life Weiss was profoundly
inspired by the notion of music as representing lament and melancholy,
specifically in Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus." "River
of Lamentation" (2005), an installation created specifically for
the Lehman College Art Gallery, includes a collaboration with the soprano
vocalist Anthony Roth Costanzo. We literally immerse our bodies in the
currents of this sound environment, the installation that takes over the
entire room, leaving us with no choice but to cross its space in order
to get to the rest of the exhibition. Transgression and passage between
drawing, music and sculpture is also reflected in the live performance
of the River of Lamentation (on Thursday, September 15 at 6pm), when an
opera vocalist lies on the ground, like the artist, as she draws around
her curled-up figure. The vocalist continually sings fragments of classical
vocal compositions, which have to do with lament, sorrow and sense of
loss. The motif of music translated into sculpture comes back in the installation
"Lethe Room" (2004) where a sculpted structure looking like
a stone tomb reveals a fragile interior, which moves gently up and down
as if breathing. Weiss designed the movement according to the rhythm of
the fragment of music by Hildegard von Bingen.

Also
included in the exhibition is "White Chalice (Ennoia)" (2004),
a sculpture in which a projected video. image of the artist's curled up
body looks at us through the surface of water. Two series of drawings
executed on pages from old books and on rice paper, "Kordyan"
(2005) and "Milk Series" (2001), represent abstracted human
figures, mostly female, in states of suspension. Based on an earlier performance,
"Drawing the City (Day One, Day Two)" (2004) presents an aerial
view of a two-day action in which the artist drew around her body on a
large-scale white canvas placed on a street. Pedestrians gradually join
her in the process, leaving the mark of their presence. On September 28
and 29 a two-day ephemeral installation Leukos will take place on the
main campus of Lehman College. The public is invited to join the artist
in the space of the installation.